I use RHEL at work. I have been using CentOS at home because it is the closest thing I can get to RHEL (without actually buying RHEL)... I also like the stability and long shelf life of CentOS... However, I am starting to wonder if perhaps I would like a cutting edge distro such as FC. I like to keep up with the latest version of whatever distro I am using... So my concern right now is that the release cycle is so rapid I might feel like I am constantly updating to the latest FC.

How difficult is it to update to the newest release? If I am running FC N-1, for example, do I have to download the latest iso of FC N, or FC N+1 to update, or can I just to the yum update thing and be current? (N Being a version, i.e. 16, 17 etc.) I would be dual booting FC with a Mac OSX machine so if that complicates the updating procedure I would like to know that in advance too. Thanks,

I use RHEL at work. I have been using CentOS at home because it is the closest thing I can get to RHEL (without actually buying RHEL)... I also like the stability and long shelf life of CentOS... However, I am starting to wonder if perhaps I would like a cutting edge distro such as FC. I like to keep up with the latest version of whatever distro I am using... So my concern right now is that the release cycle is so rapid I might feel like I am constantly updating to the latest FC.

How difficult is it to update to the newest release? If I am running FC N-1, for example, do I have to download the latest iso of FC N, or FC N+1 to update, or can I just to the yum update thing and be current? (N Being a version, i.e. 16, 17 etc.) I would be dual booting FC with a Mac OSX machine so if that complicates the updating procedure I would like to know that in advance too. Thanks,

DW

In Fedora you can install the preupgrade package and run that, it's pretty automatic. You update the os to the current latest for Fedora X, then run preupgrade, select Fedora X+1 from the menu and run the preupgrade with that.
It will download the packages needed to a specific place on disk and then the grub menu will have a new boot up item added called "Upgrade", the update will only occur when you boot to that kernel. Booting to the upgrade kernel shouldn't happen by accident, it's not set to be the default kernel, you have to manually move the keyboard arrows to select it and boot it from the grub menu

Fedora is not a continuous system and sometimes the changes made can span more than two versions.

preupgrade is for an intermediate user that has bene following Fedorda N+1.
It requires knowing about the changes and bugs of the release or pre-release repo.

But by waiting, any user can download the DVD and install it.
To upgrade N+1 boot up the DVD and it will see your old system and show that it wants to upgrade.

By doing this the system will obsole old packages, and make strucure changes better because the f/s is being treated like data, not a running system.

In the case of F16 to 17 I would use the DVD for best results, but some knowledge of the boot and recovery process is required, otherwise a clean install will be the only option.

For best results, stop updating the FN and wait for the DVD and a couple of mounts of updates (these udate repos can be used in the install (don't know about an upgrade), but even so, the first yum update after the first boot will clean up a lot of bugs.